This is Liam Guilar's Blog, mostly about poetry, mine and other people's, and anything else of interest. Over the years it has unintentionally developed into an online poetry resource, check the names in the sidebar but Bunting, Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Tennyson and the medieval poets get fair coverage. Lady Godiva and Me was a sequence of poems that linked Lady Godiva, both the historical Godgifu and the legendary Lady G, to a character growing up in the city of Coventry after the second world war.
You can see a short film about the collection Here.
My most recent book of poems, Anhaga is published by Vanzenopress and avialable from my website. Further information, full length articles and sample poems are available on my website Here .

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Saturday, June 18, 2016

Warning. From time to time one is guilty of
opinionating in public. This is one of them. It’s long and bad tempered because
I’m so tired of paying for films that are adaptations of ‘premodern’ texts
which take my money and then insult my intelligence.

Another film adaptation of a
Shakespearian play. The play Macbeth
has been around for 400 years. There’s a library about it, and there have been
numerous attempts to put that play on stage or on film and some have been
creative, some have been misguided and some have been downright weird.

There are versions: there is no ‘right’
version. But why do so many modern adaptations
require the audience to leave its brain at the door? Why are so many versions of early
modern or pre-modern texts so often reductive to the point where you’d be
forgiven for wondering if the filmmakers had ever bothered to think about the
original. Why are they so unimaginative? There are exceptions. Brilliant
exceptions, but they are so rare.

There’s probably two ways at looking at
Macbeth (2015).

Does it live on its own, free of the
original? Yes it does. As a film it looks beautiful, the acting is good, the
story rocks along and it’s an entertaining ride. If you knew nothing about
Macbeth, or ‘Macbeth’ this is an entertaining film as long as you leave your brain at the door. They could have called it Macca the Slasher
and no one would have cared: Macca goes Ape.

As an adaptation it’s a reading of the
source, so it’s possible to ask what it does with the original, or what is suggests
as a reading of the original? Answer: it’s awful. It’s yet another mediocre piece dressed up with
the usual marketing bullshit and cinema trickery which seems to miss the fact
that 400 years ago Shakespeare didn’t insult the intelligence of his audience.

Think of that initial audience. They didn’t
know the heart circulated the blood. Your average high school student who has
being paying attention knows more astronomy and geography than they did. To
find out what was wrong with you the doctor was just as liable to taste your
urine or cast your horoscope. America
was a vague rumour to the west and Australia hadn’t been invented. Newton and
his physics were over a century in the future.

But that original audience wasn’t stupid. In
Macbeth Shakespeare made something
that was a spectacle: even the stage version has weird sisters and sword fights
and apparitions, but the story works at whatever level you want to take it. It works as spectacle and profound meditation. You can't exceed it or sum it up neatly. Whatever meaning or theme you find is always opening outwards into new possibilities. He also created a
linguistic space where it was possible to think through and in language. It’s not that Shakespeare wrote some memorable
lines. His characters think through the language they use. Macbeth’s tortured
syntax in the lead up to the murder, the way images cluster and echo each
other, the way characters use their own particular sets of symbolism.You can hear these things in a production.
Duncan’s ornate syntax, the rhythm of the witches which sets them apart, Lady
Madcbeth’s habitual use of the first person plural etc.etc.etc. So claiming
that they respected the dialogue, without paying attention to how that dialogue
works, is indicative of the problem.

Yes, it’s a play about an ambitious
Scottish couple and the consequences of their ambition, but ambition is just
the specific example: every one in that audience, at some stage of their life
would stand where Macbeth did, in act one scene seven, knowing that the thing
he or she most wanted was the one thing all sane reasoning and social
conditioning said was wrong.

The tragedy lies in the way he has to face
the consequences of his decision, and the unraveling of the Macbeths’ relationship;
they start joined at the hip and they both die alone regretting their actions.
As Marjorie Garber pointed out, in the kind of easily available discussion in
her book Shakespeare After All which
should be the starting point for anyone thinking about twiddling with one of
the plays: this is not about doing an act, but being done by it.

In the ‘making of the film’ on my Blue ray
version the director says two things that are indicative of what’s wrong. The
first is that he was more interested in the 11th century Macbeth
than in Shakespeare’s. It’s a great idea. Though why you’d still use Will’s
words is a good question.

At which point the person behind the camera
should have stopped him and said, and what did you do with that information?
Did you make a film about someone called Macbeth set in the 11th
century?

A quick review of the History, which was
not known to Shakespeare and is still very patchy:

Eleventh century Scotland was not a united kingdom but a number of
smaller, competing ones. 9 of the ten ‘kings’ who ruled before Macbeth were
murdered or killed in battle by the people who took over from them. Hereditary
Kingship was not a
feature of the time.

Duncan was not regarded as a Good King. He was seen as weak and his
attempts at gaining military glory were disastrous. Macbeth’s claim to the
throne was as good as Duncan’s and he could also claim that his wife was the
granddaughter of a King.

Macbeth and the Scottish “earls”, including Banquo, rose against
Duncan after his disastrous campaign in England. There is no sense that what
Macbeth did was wrong or unusual. At the time of the Killing, Malcolm was nine
years old. By law a King had to be at least 17. He and his mother and brother
didn’t leave Scotland for two years.

Lady Macbeth was called Gruach. Her first husband was called
Gillecomgain, a son of Duncan. Gillcomegain and Duncan’s Grandfather had killed
Macbeth’s father. Lady Macbeth and Gillecomgain had a child, called Lulach.
Gillecomgain was burnt to death in his fortress, possibly by Macbeth. Macbeth married Gruach, who was also his
cousin. He was twenty-eight when they married.

Macbeth ruled a united Scotland for 17 years. He was so secure of
his position that he went on a pilgrimage to Rome

The first attempt by Siward to defeat him was unsuccessful. He was
defeated in battle by Malcolm and Siward in July 1054.Malcolm became King after the victory, but
Macbeth continued to rule the northern part of Scotland until his death in
battle against Malcolm in 1057.

Shakespeare did not know much, if any, of
this.

Think about what a leap of the imagination
it would take to try and get inside that story. How strange and alien it must
be to a modern audience. How thought provoking. And then imagine a couple with
that kind of family history. How did they negotiate their relationship? Or what it might be like to live in that world:imagine what it might be like to ‘love’
someone knowing their chances of dying in their sleep were almost non existent,
that there is no point in the day or night when you could simply relax and not
fear an assassin. Where every time they left there was a fifty-fifty chance
they might not make it back.

But part of the problem with so many film
adaptations is a basic failure to imagine.

At the level of ‘History’ this
film is botched.

At times they seemed to have played with the
idea of it being about that 11th century King.Macbeth’s ‘castle’ where he kills Duncan is
nothing but a large barn, which is probably about right, although it’s a barn
with no wall or fence around it. But
then, abruptly heaving into the distance, there’s a much later medieval castle
with cathedral like interiors. It’s a bit like a film about Drake leading the
English Navy against the Spanish Armada in 1588 with RAF Spitfires
appearingto strafe the Spanish galleys.

Battles are ridiculously stylized and silly. They seem to happen in fog or with drifting smoke. There’s knowledge, readily
available, about how 11th century battles were fought and the
weapons used in them. But here we have a Scottish 11th Century Army
in which everyone can afford a sword but not one shield or helmet is in
evidence, even amongst the Norwegians.

This does at least lead to one amusing
moment when Macbeth says, ‘Before my body/ I throw my warlike shield’. He doesn’t have one and neither does anyone
else.

The idea of a teenage boy being out of
place in an 11th century army is just daft.The idea of Macbeth being upset by this is
even dafter.Siward’s reaction to his
son’s death at the end of the play should signal this.When the ‘last reserves’ arrive, there’s not
a farm implement amongst them.

In one of the stranger moments of the film
there’s a blink and you’ll miss it execution of the first Thane of Cawdor, by
archers. But there are no archers in the battles. The battles are random melees.The English/Northumbrian army under Siward looks
suspiciously like a group of monks on horseback. They should look like the
English army in the Bayeux tapestry.They
should fight like the armies did less than ten years later at Fulford Gate and
Stamford Bridge and Senlac.If you want
to ‘do’ the 11th century do it.

Being pedantic again? No. Why do I have to
leave my brain at the door? So much time
and technological know how went into this why couldn’t they get these things
right?

The second thing I heard on the 'making of' was that Macbeth has PTSD. I’m not quoting directly. Because at that point my
brain stalled …..

Why bother calling this film Macbeth?

Shakespeare’s working method was to
multiply or remove the motivations and causes he found in his sources.This opens up his plays. It allows the
audience room to move and it does not dictate meaning. You’re an adult it says: you
make up your own mind. It’s rare to find modern films that do this.

The film begins with the Macbeths at the
funeral of a child. So that ‘explains’ Mrs Macbeth. She’s lost a child. That’s
why she does what she does. Simple.

As for Macbeth, well, apparently he has
PTSD. And that explains everything too, so it’s all good and neat. And you don’t have to think or feel, just
watch the pretty film.

Ignore the dodgy practice of analyzing
people who have been dead for ten centuries using modern categories that
probably don’t make sense when applied to the past. The distinction between soldier and civilian
in the 11th century was meaningless. Ignore the desire to ‘explain’.
Freud was guilty of this, he wanted to “solve the problem of Hamlet” and the
dead child explanation for Lady M’s actions turns up in a 1916 essay of his.

Instead ask why didn’t someone stop and consider what
happens when you make a reductive interpretation of the play that isn’t in the play and
impose it on the material.

Macbeth has PTSD. Therefore he does what he
does.The story now takes place ‘over
there’ at several removes from the audience. Not only are we not about to be drafted into
an 11th century battle, most of us don’t have PTSD. We might sympathise with those that do, but the
universal claims of the original, the sense of choices and their consequences
that everyone has to face, the limitations of morality, the way wishful
thinking can misinterpret or misread (something both Duncan and Macbeth are
guilty of), all this has been vaporized and replaced by what?

MacBeth is on the battlefield killing, Afterwards
doing stuff with dead and wounded bodies you’d expect other people to be
doing.Then he’s screwing his wife on
what seems to be an altar in a chapel, then he’s butchering Duncan in a
pointless frenzy and then he’s going weird in a room. People die. Lady Macbeth
rides across the countryside and cries. Then she dies. Then Macbeth dies.

There is no possibility of sympathy or
horror.He’s no longer a believable or
interesting person; he’s a virtual character in yet another silly hack fest. It’s a terrible waste of the actors and the
director

There’s no initial nobility, there’s no
choice made consciously leading to horrific personal and social consequences. There’s no distinction between the Macbeths in
their reactions to what they’ve done. It seems that Lady M is distraught
because Macca’s gone nuts. There’s no sense of her terrible slow realization of
her guilt.

Another thing Polanski did well in comparison
was to show the way Macbeth rots Scotland out from the centre. There’s no noble
Duncan: Duncan has basically disappeared. Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking has gone,
the Hubble bubble scene has gone. The banquet scene is botched and the death of
Lady Macduff and her family changed from the menace and horror of the original
(which even Polanski got right, despite the fact it has one of Shakespeare’s
most cringe worthy lines) to some twisted and unbelievable piece of brutal
nonsense in which they are tied to stakes and burnt with lady Macbeth looking
on.

It says something about the film that
perhaps the most memorable scene is the one where MacDuff is told his wife and
children are dead.The actors are given
space to act, the lines work, they’ve worked for four hundred years and it suddenly becomes
believable. And then its back to nonsense:

Burnham Wood becomes burning wood.

So why then, to wrap up this overlong
grumble, given all the brilliant technical skill available, given the fine
actors and the budgets and the skill of the director can’t we have a pre modern
story told with intelligence and imagination which credits an audience with
imagination and encourages it to use it?

How does a poem differ from prose?Forget metaphor, simile, and all the things
English Teachers inadvertently imply are specific to poetry.You’ll find them in prose. Poetry and prose are not a binary pair, more
like two points on a line with an almost infinite number of stages between the
extremes and if you keep going far enough in either direction you'll find yourself back where you started.

The short list of technical differences,
leaving aside set rhythm, which a lot of my examples didn’t use, might be; rhyme,
enjambment, caesura, and the stanza break.

Rhyme will make your poem memorable. I can
still recite The Shooting of Dan McGrew…but
you’re going to have to be very good to write a long story using rhyme and not
bore your reader or sound like you’ve stepped out of the 19th
century.Several of the examples in my
list are written in set rhyme schemes and they are not the ones I’d choose to
copy. Besides, on its own it won’t really alter the story as story.

Stanza breaks however are intriguing. Admittedly prose has chapters and paragraphs
and sections with their own breaks. But as Kinney pointed out in her study of
narrative poetry, stanzas create a tension between pause and forward movement.
The stanza comes to an end, suggesting the reader should pause and consider the
content, but the narrative moves on. Endstop your stanzas too heavily and
movement between them becomes difficult for the reader.Make them too fluid and the whole thing
starts to blur. The problem is compounded in a sequence where the poems are of
uneven length.

Then there’s what the comic books call the
Gutter; the white space between the stanzas or poems the reader must move
across. Hold on to that thought.

Finally, what we used to call ‘coreference’
could be exploited. Corefernce refers to aspects of a text which tie it
together. In prose, we might think of pronoun usage and tenses, but there are
different possibilities with poetry.You
could exploit sound and rhythm to suggest links between pieces of narrative
information. Characters can be developed using syntax and frame of reference, which
is something Joyce did so brilliantly, but also the poetic forms they use or are
associated with.

The
Experiment.

I’ve been wanting to do something with the
Old English ‘The Wanderer’ for decades. A speaker seems to be in an open
boat, alone, in winter.

I’ve always thought no one would be daft enough to venture out on the North Sea or the Atlantic in winter and therefore read
the words as metaphor. This is what life is like…

But who ever produced the poem we have did
a fine job of particularizing the image, so it reads like a first person
account of a lived experience.

Metaphor or literal truth, or both?

It’s a familiar question when reading a single
poem.

Take that idea a step further.

In Anhaga
Mr. Plod the Detective, is worn out by the case he can’t solve. One of his suspects, Carmilla, has begun
visiting him every night and she is sucking him dry.

If this is a ‘realistic story’ this is a
simple metaphor: he’s experiencing a sleepless night because of the case and
thinking about it is draining his energy. He’s also noticed how attractive she
is so the sexual overtones are deliberate.

But if this is a vampire story, then
Carmilla is doing exactly what the words say she’s doing.

With an individual poem, this ambiguity would be
quite normal and it would be something I'd want to try to control and limit. But what would happen if I started lining up poems where this is
happening. Instead of readers stepping across the Gutter from one poem to
another to have their initial decision about what is literal and what is a metaphor
confirmed, what happens if you step across the Gutter and find another set of
questions.

This would create a constant unresolved
‘undecidability’ between metaphor/symbol and narrative fact.If it happens often enough would you get the
illusion that there are several possible stories all working simultaneously?

In a story the generic markers tend to
reassure us as to which reading is literal within the storyworld and which is
metaphor.

As a simple example, if you’re watching a
detective story, set in a version of the ‘real world’ that most of us live in;
there are no vampires. In that context when someone says; ‘nobody believes in
Vampires’, it’s a scornful dismissal of a silly idea. Anyone who disagrees is
obviously delusional.

But if the detective is a character in a
vampire film, then we all know the speaker is about to die.Plot twists and genre benders aside, it’s
usually clear how the line should be read at least on the second watching.

But if I multiply the generic
possibilities, then something much more interesting seems to happen.

What constitutes ‘narrative information’ becomes
ambiguous.

In fictional narratives we assume that the
information we’re given usually has a purpose. We may not understand it until
we get to the end of the story, but in a conventional prose narrative if the
reader is told something, that information has some purpose in advancing the
plot or establishing a character or setting a scene etc.

In life it’s not so clear. Significance is
almost always retrospective. To look back you need a vantage point and the value
of any event lies in the retrospective narrative thread we’re following.Events of shattering significance in your
personal life may have no importance to the narrative of your career. This
doesn’t mean the narrative threads can’t get twisted together.

I was writing stories about a man who’d
lost his memory, and was searching for his own coherent sense of self. After
all, as Brooks pointed out, referring to Freud, we narrate ourselves into
coherence, and when we can’t we’re in trouble.

If you’re ever met anyone who has lost his
or her memory, or is suffering from dementia, you’ll know how tragic this is.

Rather than allow the reader to sit back
and watch the narrator flounder, I wanted to put the reader in the same
position.

I wanted to destabilize the reader’s
ability to define what is symbol and what is meant as fact. This is inherent in
the detective story, where what constitutes evidence, where the significance of
an utterance, is only revealed by the detective’s final summary.

But by multiplying the generic markers, the
movement towards instability becomes exaggerated and removing the final summary
beloved of all crime writers but epitomized by Agatha Christie’s Poirot takes
out the final confirmation or revelation of significance.

I wrote a back story for each of the
different versions: A detective story, a vampire story, a strange fantasy of
reincarnation and a psychological thriller about a man who has lost his memory.I planned the sequence using an app I’d downloaded
which allowed me to create nodes and trace different coloured lines between
them.

Well, that’s the advertising tag, but anyone
who claims to have done something new in poetry is either ignorant of history,
suffering from a temporary though convenient historical amnesia, or delusional.
It’s all been done, several times and poets and critics who claim to be
creating or recognizing something ‘new’ or ‘innovative’ are simply forgetting
the wheel has already been discovered and refined. Or they have found new ways
of ‘conceptualizing’ the wheel in such a way that the theory sounds like its
different but in practice the wheel still rolls.

So in writing Anhaga I wasn’t out to ‘reinvent’ the long poem.

I started with a question: how could a
story told in a sequence of poems differ from a story told in Prose.

Background

As a result of what’s been called ‘the
lyricization of poetry’ the short ‘lyric’ poem has become the default model: it’s
what most people think of when they hear the word ‘poem’. There have been book
length narratives, but they tend to be in the minority. Some of them are very
good. Australia seems to have produced its fair share of excellent examples:
Freddy Neptune, The Monkey’s Mask and The Love Makers stand out. More recently,
Lisa Jacobsen’s The Sunlit Zone’was an interesting example.

So I started out to become knowledgeable about
the field. I already knew most of the long poems prior to the Twentieth
century, though during a break I did read The Ring and the Book….

At the start of this project I
set myself the task of reading or rereading all the long poems and sequences
written by major poets in the twentieth century side stepping the question of whether
they were narrative or not. Whether this is immersion in the tradition, or
possession or simply knowing remains a moot point.I read: The Baboon in the Night Club,Paterson,
Four Quartets, The Waste Land, Cantos, A,
On Being Numerous,Briggflatts, Villon,
The Spoils, Chomei at Tomai,The Great
Hunger, Station Island ,V,For all we
know, The Monkey’s Mask , The Sleeping Beauty, What A Piece of Work, The Bridge, Crazy Horse in Stillness, Bunny, Freddy Neptune,
Sedgemoor, The Dream Songs, The Love Makers , Time's Fool, Quiver, Deepstep Come Shining, My
Life, The Maximus poems,Ketjak,Summoned by Bells,Slinger,Madoc: a mystery, The Changing Light at Sandover, Ko:or A Season on
Earth,In Parenthesis,The Anathemata, Things that happen (Ten
volumes),Ghost writer: a novel in verse,
Autumn Journal, Autumn Sequel, Autobiography of Red, Meme, Billy’s Rain,
Crow,Mercian Hymns, Rapture, My lover
as a horse, Dart, The Golden Gate, The Triumph of Love, the Orchards of Sion, A Drunk
man Looks atThistle, The Battle field
Where the Moon Says I Love You , I have to go back to 1994 and kill a Girl, The Inevitable Gift Shop …

Anyone reading this list will probably wonder what happened to the idea that I was reading 'Major Poets'. They will also probably notice their favourite absolutely essential candidate is missing. More on that later....

The
length of this list took me by surprise. Given that ‘the Lyricization of
poetry’ is generally accepted as an historical phenomenon, there seems to be no
shortage of long poems or sequences. It’s a good trivial pursuits question:
Name a well-known poet who didn’t attempt a longer poem or sequence?

But the
length of this list (with the three dots at the end) is not to demonstrate my
diligence or to show how well-read am I, but to underline the fact that there is
no practical way the list can be ‘completed’. I’ve always believed Eliot’s comment in ‘Tradition
and the Individual Talent’ that a poet needs to know the Tradition but as usual
with Eliot, famous and resonant critical statements tend to turn to smoke when
you try and put them into practice.

I had thought to read those written by ‘major
poets’ but what does that mean? There was no objective standard by which one poem could be included and others left out.

If I
were preparing a survey course in English Medieval Poetry, there are certain
poems and poets that cannot be avoided. I may think the anonymous genius who
wrote ‘Gawain and the Green Knight’ is more interesting as a poet than Chaucer,
but it would be willfully perverse to pretend Chaucer was not more important in
the long term and fatuous to claim that Robert of Gloucester was more important
or a better poet than either.

However,
it’s difficult to see who MUST be
included in a study of the long poem/sequence in the twentieth century.Or for that matter what constitutes a ‘long
poem’ or a ‘sequence’. Attempts at definition are about as helpful as attempts
to define ‘the lyric’ or to distinguish between ‘narrative poem’ and ‘verse
novel’. Is it even meaningful to lump such disparate productions under their
various hyphenated categories. The fact the lines don’t always reach the right
hand margin is about all they have in common. That's a thought for a different line of enquiry.

The
Waste Land is only four hundred lines long. If it’s long, what is The
Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, at 15,283 lines.At the beginning of my research I assumed The
Waste Land and the Cantos were essential parts
of the tradition, (rather than essential in the way I think Briggflatts is)
but there are lines of influence in twentieth century poetry that simply ignore
their existence. The field is not coherent. There will always be a text I
haven’t read, and no way of knowing if that text would have answered my
question had I read it. So if you think I missed out an essential text, I'm sorry. But you can always tell me and I'll read it.

However, the majority of these poems, no
matter how good they are, leave the question open: Would Freddy Neptune or the
Monkey be lesser books if they were written in continual prose? They tell a
story with fixed internal focalization using an autodiegetic narrator. Compared
with the narrative freedom of a lot of modern prose or even some forms of cinema,
poetry seems very conservative as a narrative vehicle though I’d exempt
Carson’s ‘For all We Know’. It seems to
me that Alan Garner and Werner Herzog have been doing far more interesting
things with narrative. And I’m sure other people with vastly more knowledge of prose
could make a longer list. (Okay, I’d throw in Cervantes, Stern, Le Fanu,Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien.)

There are of course the ‘post modern’
variants. Brian McHale managed to write a fine book about the postmodern long
poem, The Obligation Towards the Difficult
Whole, without actually defining either long or post modern. He identifies (p.
258ff) three ways in which the postmodern poem outflanks the modernist
‘interdiction on narrative’, the third being the strategy McHale calls ‘weak
narrativity’. This ‘involves precisely telling stories ‘poorly’, distractedly,
with much irrelevance and indeterminacy, in such as way as to evoke narrative coherence while at the
same time withholding commitment to it and undermining confidence in it’.

It’s a classic example of what passes as
profound in literary-speak. The return to telling stories involved not telling
stories.The return to cooking involved avoiding
cooking. As Peter Brooks pointed out, if the narrative elements don’t cohere,
you don’t have a narrative. You can theorize this til the cows come home, but
unless the reader can link the story elements without external prompts, then you
don’t have a story.

So my question was: how might a story told
with poems, be different to a story told in prose and still be a recognizable
story. Part two to follow. There is an answer to this in part three.